An agreement reached this week in California will see that prison officials are no longer allowed to segregate inmates by race in the event of lockdowns at facilities across the state.

The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday published a stipulated settlement reached
between the state’s prison system and a group of inmates that
should once and for all resolve a long-standing class action suit
filed High Desert State Prison inmate Robert Mitchell in 2008.

According to the Times, Mitchell claimed in a 2008 filing that
it was the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation’s policy that "when there is an incident
involving any race, all inmates of that race are locked up.”
The instance that spawned the suit, an inmate-on-guard attack in
2006 at High Desert, left all black detainees confined to an
African American-only wing of the facility for 14 months, solely
because of race, which prison officials argued was necessary to
control violent prison gangs that are often ethnicity-exclusive.
Once the agreement posted by the paper this week becomes
official, then that will change.

“The parties have conducted extensive negotiations over
several months to resolve Plaintiffs’ demands that CDCR change
its statewide policies and practices concerning modified programs
and lockdowns,” the settlement reads in part. “Those
negotiations have been undertaken at arm’s length and in good
faith between Plaintiffs’ counsel and high-ranking state
officials and their counsel. The parties have reached agreement
on statewide policies and practices that CDCR has already begun
to implement to settle Plaintiffs’ claims for declaratory and
injunctive relief. The parties freely, voluntarily, and
knowingly, with the advice of counsel, enter into this
Stipulation for that purpose.”

Specifically, the settlement says the CDCR will no longer
implement race-based modified programs or lockdowns, and that,
instead, security measures taken to control inmates in certain
circumstances will be imposed based on individualized threat
assessments.

“CDCR will only place an inmate on a modified program that
impacts a security threat group if an individualized review of
that inmate’s central file indicates an affiliation, based on
sufficiently reliable and current information, with the
security-threat group impacted by the modified program,” it
reads.

Additionally, the settlement stipulates that inmates subjected to
any sort of lockdown must be allowed to partake in outdoor
activity time if the duration of the period exceeds 14 days: a
major change given that, according to the Associated Press, prison officials in the
Golden State impose more than 600 lockdowns in an average year.

"The prisons will still be able to maintain security, while
prisoners will no longer be targeted for lengthy lockdowns just
because of their race or ethnicity," Rebekah Evenson, an attorney
for the prisoners, said of the agreement in a statement to
Reuters.

"We see this as a tremendous result," Evenson told the Times.

A federal judge is expected to next review the agreement at an
upcoming hearing, Reuters reported, and will then likely approve
it.